


Popping the Tires

by wheel_pen



Series: Alice [26]
Category: Smallville
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Naughtiness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-01
Updated: 2013-05-01
Packaged: 2017-12-10 02:34:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,615
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/780771
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wheel_pen/pseuds/wheel_pen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Somehow, all the tires on Clark’s truck get popped. His parents are sensing a theme.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Popping the Tires

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. Alice, my original female character, is new in Smallville. There is something special about her, and she and Clark form a relationship.
> 
> 2\. This series starts after the end of the second season—after the destruction of the spaceship and Clark abruptly leaving town.
> 
> 3\. Underage warning: This story may contain human or human-like teenagers, in high school, in sexual situations.
> 
> 4\. The bad words are censored. That’s just how I do things.
> 
> I hope you enjoy this AU. I own nothing and appreciate the chance to play in this universe.

            Jonathan Kent was in the middle of a very strange dream about Jimi Hendrix helping him escape from a spray-cheese factory when he was awakened by a noise that sounded like a gunshot. For a moment he stilled in bed, wondering if it had been part of his dream, then he felt his wife moving beside him. “What was that?” Martha whispered frantically.

            “I don’t know,” he replied, sitting up. Immediately the two of them pulled on robes and slippers, and Jonathan hurried downstairs to grab his shotgun from above the door—this being Smallville, you could never be sure what you were going to find lurking outside your door in the middle of the night.

            Martha met him at the foot of the stairs. “Clark isn’t in his room,” she told her husband worriedly. The look he gave her conveyed what they were both thinking—that wherever he was, Clark was probably fine, gunshot or no gunshot. But they were still anxious.

            A second loud bang made them both jump. “Sounds like it’s coming from the backyard,” Jonathan decided, and he cautiously opened the kitchen door leading outside. He poked his head—and the shotgun—out and glanced around. Seeing nothing out of the ordinary, Jonathan stepped onto the back porch, with Martha on his heels.

            “I don’t see Clark’s truck,” his wife pointed out, and Jonathan nodded grimly. As usual, whenever there was trouble, their son managed to find it. Generally things turned out the better for everyone involved, due to Clark’s intervention, but still…

            “I’ll check the barn,” Jonathan decided, hoping his wife would decide to stay behind in the house. Of course, she didn’t, which he had to admit was one of the things he loved about her.

            Quickly they crossed the open yard to the barn, the one nicknamed Clark’s Fortress of Solitude. “Wait,” Martha said in confusion, her hand on Jonathan’s shoulder. “Isn’t that Clark’s truck over _there_?”

            Sure enough, if they looked through the open doors of the barn they could see the tail end of the dusty blue pick-up just beyond. “Why would he park it back there?” Jonathan muttered, carefully picking his way around the pieces of machinery and random farm storage items littering the barn floor.

            As they approached the back doors of the barn a strange sound was carried their way, something much softer and more human than a gunshot. More like… a moan of pain? The sound rose and fell but gradually grew louder the closer they got to the truck. Perhaps someone had been injured?

            “Ohhh…. Ohhhhhhh….” continued the voice, which was sounding more and more distinctly female. “Ohhhh… Clark!” Jonathan froze mid-step and finally put his other foot down just to keep from falling over. “Mmmm… Clark, yes…” There was another sound emerging below the moan, a deeper sort of… grunting really. And Jonathan also noticed that the truck was… moving slightly. Rhythmically.

            “Oh my G-d,” Martha breathed beside him.

            The moaning increased suddenly. “Ohhh… Ohhhhhh… Ohhhhhhhhh—G-d! Clark!” And then a back tire of the truck blew out, with a noise like a gunshot.

            “S—t,” murmured a voice from the back of the truck that was _very_ familiar to Jonathan and Martha. The feminine voice that had been moaning started to giggle, and Clark ground out, “Don’t start laughing, Alice, I’m trying to—“

            “Let’s go back in the house right now,” Jonathan decided, spinning around quickly.

            “Yes, absolutely,” Martha agreed, hurrying beside him. They had almost made it back inside before the fourth and final tire popped.

 

            Jonathan took a little bit longer eating his breakfast the next morning than he usually did, but eventually he had to push the plate away and stand up. Martha gave him a look from the stove that was part sympathetic, part amused as he headed out the back door.

            Behind the barn he found Clark and Alice changing the tires on the truck. Alice was holding the end of the truck up, one-handed, while Clark tightened the lug nuts with his fingers instead of a wrench. “Now were you watching what I just did there?” he was saying to her as Jonathan ambled up. “You can’t turn them too tight.”

            “I was watching,” Alice protested.

            “I’m not sure about that,” Clark teased her, expression serious. “I think you’re going to have to do the next one, to prove you were watching.” Jonathan cleared his throat, and Clark’s face immediately turned guilty when he turned and saw his father. “Um, good morning, Dad,” he said with forced casualness.

            “Good morning, Mr. Kent,” Alice chimed in politely, setting the truck back down.

            “You two are up pretty early this morning,” Jonathan commented, feeling rather awkward. He couldn’t help but notice that Alice was wearing Clark’s blue plaid shirt—the one _he’d_ been wearing at dinner the night before.

            “Um, just some… chores to do,” Clark replied lamely, his cheeks coloring. Alice glanced at her shoes and bit her lip to conceal a grin.

            “Popped a tire, huh?”

            “Yeah,” Clark agreed a little too quickly.

            Jonathan took a deep breath. “Uh, son—when you’re done, your mother and I would like a word with you in the house.”

            “Okay, Dad.”

            Jonathan nodded and retreated. As soon as he was out of earshot, Alice started snickering and Clark sighed and leaned against the truck. “Time for the breakfast sex lecture, huh?” she suggested.

            “Yeah, that’ll be fun,” he responded sarcastically. “I guess the… tires woke them up.”

            “I really am sorry about that, Clark,” Alice assured him.

            He smiled at her and slid his arms around her waist. She still smelled like him, or at least his laundry detergent. “Well, I figure I’m responsible for at least _two_ of them,” he told her warmly.

            She let her fingers creep up his arms under the sleeves of his red t-shirt. “Well, _I_ think it was worth it,” she suggested. Clark start to nod in agreement, then thought about the talk awaiting him in the kitchen and grimaced. “You want me to come with?” Alice offered reluctantly. “To defend your honor?”

            Clark considered that, but then decided it wouldn’t be right. And it would be considerably more embarrassing. “No, that’s okay. Thanks though.”

            “Okay then.” She glanced at her watch. “I gotta get home and shower.”

           “What are you going to tell your mom?” he asked, brow furrowed. Surely she would wonder where Alice had been.

           The dark-haired girl smirked. “My mom was out on a date with Lex last night,” she revealed, “so _she_ probably isn’t home either.” Clark grinned. Lex was due for some more ribbing from him about his infatuation with Ms. Wilson. “I’ll see you at school, okay?”

            “Okay,” Clark smiled. Alice leaned up to kiss him good-bye and stopped only when the truck squeaked as they rocked against it. “Easy, easy,” Clark told her, laughing, “we already busted through one set of tires on this thing.”

            “Well next time we’ll take them off first,” she replied easily.

            “Yeah,” Clark sighed dubiously, “if I haven’t had any essential parts surgically removed by next time.”

            “I’d be worried,” Alice teased, “but since I know it’s not physically possible…”

            Clark was reluctant to let go of her, but he figured he had to get The Talk over with at some point… hopefully before he was late to school again. Following his determined gaze back to the house, Alice stepped back with a sigh. “Okay. I’m going. Bye.”

            “Bye.”

            “See you at school.”

            “Yeah.”

            Finally, Alice made a run for it, her shape blurring as she launched into superspeed. Clark knew she would be home within seconds. He, however, chose a more normal pace to bring himself to the kitchen, where his mom was pulling a batch of muffins out of the oven. He took the hot pan for her with his bare hands and set it on the counter.

            “Thanks, honey,” Martha told him. She waited a moment as Clark nodded without meeting her eye and began to pick at one of the muffins absently. Finally Martha asked in confusion, “Where’s Alice?”

            Clark decided red was going to be his face’s main color for the next several minutes, so he didn’t try to fight the blush at even this innocent question. “She went home,” he replied quietly.

            “Oh.” Martha paused to turn off the oven and set her hot pads aside. “You know, Clark,” she finally began, “we usually let overnight guests stay for breakfast.” She poured herself a cup of coffee and brought the pot over to the table to refresh Jonathan’s, forcing Clark to turn and face them both. “And we also let them stay in the house.”

            The determinedly _normal_ tone of her voice just made it all worse, Clark decided. At least if they got angry, he could get defensive in response. Which would make things more uncomfortable in the long run, he supposed, but at least he’d have something to _say_.

            “Um, yeah…” he started awkwardly. “Um… Sorry we woke you up.” They seemed to expect something else. “We’re gonna replace the tires,” Clark assured them.

            “The _tires_ aren’t the main issue here, son,” Jonathan pointed out, a bit gruffly. “Now, look, Clark, we’ve talked about this… kind of… possibility before, and, uh…” He looked desperately at Martha for help, but she shook her head. “…and, well, I guess your mother and I were just kind of taken by surprise. Last night.”

            “Clark,” Martha said, leaning forward a bit, “we want you to feel like you can talk to us about anything.” Clark raised his eyebrows dubiously, thinking back about a number of things he had absolutely _no_ intention of discussing with his parents, many of which had occurred last night. “We would have liked you to talk to us before you… and Alice… took this kind of step. In your relationship.”

            Clark opened his mouth but honestly had no idea what to say. “Are you mad at me?” he finally asked.

            “We’re just _concerned_ , Clark,” Jonathan corrected. “I mean, this is a—a big… thing. With Alice and, um—well, it’s not something you can be casual about.”

            “We’re not casual,” Clark insisted, although frankly he wasn’t really sure what his father meant by that.

            “You have to be careful,” Jonathan clarified.

            “We’re careful.”

            “Do you use… protection?” Martha asked earnestly.

            “Yes, we do.” _Please don’t ask, please don’t ask_ —

            “What kind?”

            “Mom…” Clark pleaded. “We went to Planned Parenthood in Metropolis, we’re _careful_.”

            Jonathan sighed. “Look, Clark, we’re not mad at you. We raised you to do what you thought was best. It’s just…”

            “We don’t like that you felt you had to sneak around and keep this a secret from us,” Martha finished firmly.

            “Well, geez, Mom, it’s not like I _want_ to have sex where you can hear me,” Clark pointed out, trying not to sound cheeky. The instant the words were out of his mouth, however, he couldn’t believe he’d actually said them. The effect of using the words “I” and “sex” in the same sentence—to his parents—was… interesting, judging by the expressions on their faces. Clark hurriedly added, “And besides, something weird happens every time, so it’s kind of better to be away from other people and buildings and… flammable objects and…”

            “Every time?” Jonathan repeated in surprise. “How many times are we talking about here?”

            “Um… several,” Clark hedged.

            Martha picked up on a different comment. “What do you mean, something ‘weird’ happens?”

            At this point Clark decided he had no embarrassment left in him. The “I-sex” barrier had been broken, after all. “Well, like the tires popping,” he pointed out. “I mean, I’m just _assuming_ that doesn’t happen to other people…”

            “I thought that was a, um…” Jonathan made a vague gesture with his hands. “A mechanical effect. Of the… rocking.”

            Clark shrugged. “I don’t think so. Last month we blew out all the windows in the house.”

            This news received a more dramatic reaction. “What?” exclaimed both his parents simultaneously. They each glanced at different windows, as if expecting them to really be gaping holes that had gone unnoticed for four weeks.

            “We got them replaced,” Clark pointed out, “before you guys came back from that bank thing in Metropolis.”

            “And you didn’t tell us?” Martha protested. “Clark, breaking all the windows in the house is a pretty big deal.”

            “Well,” he replied carefully, “I think telling you about it--would have led to the inevitable awkward questions. And anyway, we paid to fix them.”

            “Wait a minute,” Jonathan interjected. “I just don’t understand what exactly you were doing that led to _all_ the windows breaking.”

            Again Clark opened his mouth, then thought back and decided he really didn’t want to go into the details. “Nothing… _weird_ ,” he finally decided, after a very long pause. “I mean, we were just upstairs and… first the windows in my room broke, and then they just kind of… blew out all over the house.” Jonathan and Martha shared a look of utter confusion. But now Clark was on a roll. “Sometimes things catch on fire,” he continued, “which I guess is kind of understandable. Or there’s weird lights.”

            “Lights?” repeated Jonathan. If he didn’t know Clark so well, he would have thought he was being put on. Although, since he had _just_ found out that Clark and his girlfriend were— _intimate_ … well, it was certainly a new way of thinking about his son. And not one he was sure he liked.

            “Yeah, like, uh… Like at school people said they saw these fireworks over Hobb’s Pond one night, and that was the night Alice and I were… on the raft in the middle of the pond,” Clark told them. He actually _had_ been feeling guilty about the sneaking around… and he had always been able to turn to his parents with new manifestations of his powers in the past. Really, this was just kind of an extension of that. In a sense. “I thought maybe if we were in the middle of the pond stuff wouldn’t catch on fire,” he added, seeing the confused expressions on his parents’ faces.

            “Hold on,” Jonathan said suddenly, knowingly. “Those strange lights coming from the loft, and the cellar—that was _you_ two?” The sheepish look Clark gave him answered the question. “Here I thought I was going crazy.” He shook his head. Now that he thought about it, he had seen those lights a _lot…_ over the past three or four _months_.

            “We’re getting better,” Clark offered, quickly adding, “at not… destroying anything. The tires were a new thing,” he admitted. “But usually now it’s just lights. Or… floating.”

            “Floating?” Martha responded. Clark shrugged.

            There was a long silence. Then Jonathan finally said, “Well, I guess you’d better get ready for school, son.”

            “Yeah,” Clark agreed, tremendously relieved.

            “But Clark,” his mother added as he started to head upstairs, “your father and I really like Alice, and we don’t want you two to feel like you have to… lie to us or anything like that. And that you can come to us with any… concerns you might have.”

            “And you should definitely tell us the next time you actually _break_ something,” his father put in.

            “Okay, sure,” Clark replied. That actually hadn’t gone too badly. He was very pleased. He knew that after he’d left for school they were probably going to talk _and_ worry a lot more… but at least they didn’t yell at him and tell him he couldn’t see Alice anymore. Not that he really thought they _would_ do that—the last part, anyway—but he suspected it wouldn’t work if they _had_.


End file.
